I encountered a little problem today, I use macports version of coreutils which gives me access to gnu versions of some commands (for full list : sudo port contents coreutils | grep /bin). My problem is related to one of those I’m using in my bashrc to color my shell : dircolors (gdircolors in macports).

This little commands allows you to generate LS_COLORS values (as the name seems to imply, it’s used by ls command) from a config file (~/.dir_colors in my case). I confidently modified this file today and was welcomed by a nice csh: Unknown colorls variable `su'.
It turns out there are an incompatibility between LS_COLORS generated by current version of dircolors in coreutils and (t)csh : tcsh treat LS_COLORS as a magic environment variable, which means it is parsed for its own use in ls builtin command.

The culprits in my .dir_colors file was :

#SETUID 37;41 # file that is setuid (u+s)
#SETGID 30;43 # file that is setgid (g+s)
#STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE 30;42 # dir that is sticky and other-writable (+t,o+w)
#OTHER_WRITABLE 34;42 # dir that is other-writable (o+w) and not sticky
#STICKY 37;44 # dir with the sticky bit set (+t) and not other-writable

As you can see a simple fix is to comment them out.

In fact I’m not sure why I see those errors poping up, as I’m using bash ans it’s now the default in MacOSX.